In the latest convolution on the topic of violence and video games, research …

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When last Ars visited the topic of violence and video games, a study had suggested that a potential link between violence and gaming might come from a combination of anger and unstable personalities. But a newer study now takes a look at a related question and suggests that violent games may increase aggression without triggering any increase in anger. The apparently contradictory results can be rationalized, and doing so may tell us something about why the whole topic is so confused.

To briefly recap the earlier study, researchers surveyed students about their general personalities and identified stable and unstable groups. They found that unstable personalities were affected by violent game content, such that those who were calm registered as being angrier after gaming and vice versa. Anger served as a proxy for aggressive behavior in this study, and only the momentary anger levels of the subjects was measured.

Contrast that with the newer study: here, anger was measured as a long-term personality trait, and actual measures of aggression were used to test for correlations among violent games, anger, and aggression. These subtle differences in experimental design mean that the two studies addressed questions that were almost unrelated, but identifying them requires reading the actual experimental design in the papers.

In the new paper, subjects played violent or nonviolent games, given three incomplete stories, and asked to provide 20 responses for how they would act if they were involved. The response of those playing violent games was more aggressive, but barely so: roughly nine out of the 60 responses were scored as aggressive, compared to about seven for those playing nonviolent games. These sorts of results are typical of the response caused by exposure to any violent media; the authors even note that a study that put people in a hot room registered a similar rise in aggression.

When the scores were correlated with long-term anger, it became clear that those who were relatively calm were also largely unaffected by violent content. Angry subjects, in contrast, demonstrated increased aggression when exposed to violent games (they were unaffected by nonviolent ones). It appears that the majority of the connection between violent games and aggression depends largely on the general mental state of the gamer.

In this sense, the two studies reach a very similar conclusion, despite the many methodological differences. It's even possible that the traits they examine—stability and long-term anger—reflect a single, underlying personality feature. The two studies also provide a similar caution for society at large: violent gaming content may, like other violent content, exacerbate control issues in a subset of personalities. But they also suggest that intervening with these personalities might be the best way to proceed. Restricting violent games casts a wide net that limits individuals unlikely to be affected by them and does nothing to limit the exposure of at-risk personalities to other violent media.

What's also striking is how easily the results of these two studies could be used to support nearly any opinion on the connection between violence and gaming. Either a careless or an intentionally-biased reading of them could find a subset of results that indicated either that violent games were completely harmless or clearly linked to aggression. This, more than anything else, may be why the literature on this topic seems confused.